Fair AND Balanced!

For a “quick-hitting” lesson on media bias and the people that make it happen, let’s turn to this week’s edition of Monday Morning Quarterback. Peter King, our favorite Starbucks swilling doofus, has decided to cover the opening Monday Night Football games in a manner so “fair and balanced,” it would make Bill O’Reilly blush.

He begins his analysis with the (probably valid) assessment that “[ESPN’s] not going to have good games tonight.” Fair enough. The Patriots and Chargers are both heavily favored against their respective opponents, the Bills and Raiders, who are expected to be among the AFC’s worst teams. One would expect, then, that he would not have much to say about either game, right? Let me pause for a moment and remind you of the following fact: Peter King is a HUGE Patriots fan. Although you probably picked up on that if you read down to the next paragraph. Or the next one. Or the one after that. Or the chart comparing this year’s Patriots’ defense to that of the ’08 team. Don’t get me wrong—I enjoy reading His Majesty’s columns, and much of what he has to say in this section is interesting to me as a fellow Patriots fan. I just feel bad for any of his readers out there who are Chargers fans. Their team only gets two dismissive sentences dedicated to it—one of which states that Richard Seymour, the long-time New England defensive lineman who was recently traded to Oakland, is the only “reason to tune in”!

To be fair, His Majesty does not make the lofty claims of objectivity that certain network news channels do—still, it would be nice if he made a little more of an effort to cover up his biases.

Update: Both Monday Night games came down to the final seconds—and ended with the favored team, led by its star quarterback, putting together a game-winning drive. Not surprisingly, King’s article this morning is all about the Patriots and Tom Brady’s triumphant return. He does not even mention the Chargers or anything to do with the second game. Hmmmm…

Advertisements

Like this:

LikeLoading...

Related

This entry was posted on September 14, 2009 at 8:43 pm and is filed under Benji, MMQB. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.